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Am I the only software engineer greatly worried and disturbed by AI ? (lemm.ee)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Ok let's give a little bit of context. I will turn 40 yo in a couple of months and I'm a c++ software developer for more than 18 years. I enjoy to code, I enjoy to write "good" code, readable and so.

However since a few months, I become really afraid of the future of the job I like with the progress of artificial intelligence. Very often I don't sleep at night because of this.

I fear that my job, while not completely disappearing, become a very boring job consisting in debugging code generated automatically, or that the job disappear.

For now, I'm not using AI, I have a few colleagues that do it but I do not want to because one, it remove a part of the coding I like and two I have the feeling that using it is cutting the branch I'm sit on, if you see what I mean. I fear that in a near future, ppl not using it will be fired because seen by the management as less productive...

Am I the only one feeling this way? I have the feeling all tech people are enthusiastic about AI.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I think your job in your current form is likely in danger.

SOTA Foundation Models like GPT4 and Gemini Ultra can write code, execute, and debug with special chain of thought prompting techniques, and large acale process verification on synthetic data and RL search for correct outputs will make this 10x better. The silver lining to this is that I expect this to require an absolute shit ton of compute to constantly generate LLM output hundreds of times for each internal prompt over multiple prompts, requiring immense compute and possibly taking longer than an ordinary software engineer to run. I suspect early full stack developer LLMs will mainly be used to do a few very tedious coding tasks and SWEs will be cheaper for a fair length of time.

I expect it will be 2-3 years before this happens, so for that short period I expect workers to be "super-productive" by using LLMs in the coding process, but I expect the crossover point when the LLM becomes better is quite soon, perhaps in the next 5 years as compute requirements go down.